Carnal Election Against Spiritualized Israel
Michael Wyschogrod’s The Body of Faith: God in the People Israel is one of the most important modern Jewish theological works for resisting a purely spiritualized definition of Israel. If Walter Kaiser helps Christians recover the continuity of God’s promise-plan, and if Michael Vlach helps distinguish biblical Israel from the modern State of Israel, Wyschogrod presses the deeper scandal: God has chosen a people in the flesh.
Israel is not an idea. Israel is not merely a religious community. Israel is not simply a moral symbol or a missionary instrument. Israel is the embodied people descended from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the people in whom God has placed his name, his love, his election, his discipline, and his promises.
This is why Wyschogrod matters for covenantal realism. He will not allow Christians to say, “Israel continues,” while quietly redefining Israel into a spiritual abstraction. Nor will he allow a universal theology of humanity to bypass the Jewish body. For Wyschogrod, the God of Israel is not the God of abstract humanity first and only then the God of Israel. He is the God who freely loves Abraham and Abraham’s seed, and through that scandalous particular love opens the path toward humanity’s redemption.
I. Wyschogrod’s Central Claim
The center of Wyschogrod’s theology is the unconditional election of the Jewish people. This election is not based on Israel’s virtue, moral superiority, intelligence, spirituality, or religious achievement. God chose Israel because God chose Israel. Election is grounded in God’s free love.
Kendall Soulen summarizes Wyschogrod’s central theme well: God’s election of Israel rests on God’s unalterable love and therefore cannot be annulled from the human side. Israel’s disobedience brings judgment, but not cancellation. The covenant can be wounded, punished, and resisted, but not revoked. The Jewish people remain the people God loves “unto the end of time.”¹
This is crucial for Christian theology because supersessionism almost always begins by making Israel’s election conditional. Israel failed; therefore the church replaces Israel. Israel rejected Christ; therefore the Jewish people lose their covenantal significance. Israel becomes useful only as warning, background, or prophecy chart.
Wyschogrod rejects this. Israel’s election is not first a reward for obedience. It is God’s free act of love. Obedience matters, and judgment is real, but disobedience does not erase the beloved identity of Israel. This is deeply Pauline: “As regards election, they are beloved for the sake of the fathers, for the gifts and calling of God are irrevocable.”
II. Carnal Election
Wyschogrod’s most provocative phrase is “carnal election.” By this he does not mean crude racialism or biological superiority. He means that God’s election enters history through a real people, a real lineage, real bodies, real generations, real families, real suffering, and real continuity.
This is the scandal modern theology often tries to avoid. We prefer ideals to bodies. We prefer principles to genealogies. We prefer universal ethics to particular election. We prefer “the people of God” as an invisible spiritual category rather than a visible people with memory, wounds, circumcision, exile, Sabbath, children, blood, tears, and graves.
But biblical election is not embarrassed by flesh. God chooses Abraham. Sarah bears Isaac. Rebekah bears Jacob. Israel comes through wombs, births, households, marriages, barrenness, exile, return, discipline, and promise. God’s covenant is not an abstraction floating above bodies. It is carried through bodies.
R. R. Reno saw this clearly when he wrote that The Body of Faith opposed liberal theology’s tendency to reduce revelation to universal abstractions. Wyschogrod insists instead on the concrete “seed of Abraham” and the particularity of divine command. He even draws a striking comparison: Jewish election and Christian incarnation both refuse abstraction. Judaism points to the Jewish people; Christianity points to the Jewish body of Jesus on the cross.²
This is exactly why Wyschogrod is so valuable for Christian anti-supersessionism. If God’s election of Israel is carnal, then the church cannot simply spiritualize Israel and claim to have fulfilled it. A spiritualized Israel becomes an Israel without Jews. And an Israel without Jews is not biblical Israel.
III. Israel Is Not Race, but Neither Is Israel an Idea
We must be careful. Wyschogrod’s carnal election must not be turned into racial theology. Israel is not a racial essence. The Torah itself resists that reading. The mixed multitude comes out of Egypt with Israel. The ger is drawn near. Rahab and Ruth are incorporated. The covenant has expandable edges.
Yet the presence of conversion and incorporation does not make Israel bodiless. A family can adopt without ceasing to be a family. A people can receive the stranger without becoming an abstraction. The ger does not prove that Israel is merely spiritual; the ger proves that Israel is a real covenantal body into which others may be joined.
This helps us define Israel properly.
Israel is a covenanting peoplehood: genealogy and memory, oracle-keeping, worship, land and exile, priestly vocation, belonging, and accountability before God. The Jewish people remain the major enduring trunk-line of Israel, the custodians of Israel’s Scriptures and promises. But Israel’s flesh is covenantal flesh, not racial essence. It is embodied election under divine command.
Here Wyschogrod corrects both sides. Against racial nationalism, Israel’s election is not biological superiority. Against spiritualized Christianity, Israel’s election is not a replaceable idea. Israel is the chosen people in the flesh.
IV. Wyschogrod and Benamozegh
Benamozegh and Wyschogrod belong together, but they emphasize different sides of the mystery.
Benamozegh teaches that Israel’s particular Torah serves humanity’s universal covenant. Israel is trustee of divine truth for the nations. Noah and Sinai belong together. The Jewish people do not exist for themselves alone; they exist for the healing of humanity.
Wyschogrod teaches that this universal service cannot be detached from the embodied Jewish people. Humanity is not blessed through an idea called Israel, but through Abraham’s actual seed. The universal depends on the particular. The nations are blessed through the family God chose.
Benamozegh protects Israel from narrowness.
Wyschogrod protects Israel from abstraction.
Together they allow us to say:
Israel is not replaced by the church.
Israel is not reduced to the modern state.
Israel is not dissolved into humanity.
Israel is not elevated as racial superiority.
Israel is the embodied priestly people through whom God’s promise to humanity is carried.
V. Wyschogrod Against Supersessionism
Supersessionism often claims to honor Israel while removing Israel’s body. It says Israel is fulfilled in Christ, but then treats the Jewish people as theologically irrelevant. It says the church is the true Israel, but then forgets that Paul’s olive tree has natural branches, patriarchal roots, and a warning against Gentile boasting.
Wyschogrod exposes the hidden violence of this move. If Israel is the body of faith, then to claim Israel’s inheritance while dismissing the Jewish people is an act of theological theft. It is Esau’s wound repeated in Christian form: seized blessing without reverence for the brother.
This is Torat Edom. Edom is the law of seized blessing. Christendom became Edom whenever it took Israel’s Scriptures, Israel’s Messiah, Israel’s promises, and Israel’s hope while despising Israel’s flesh-and-blood existence.
Wyschogrod will not allow that. He forces Christians to face the continuing theological significance of Jewish embodiment. The Jewish people are not a museum of failed religion. They are not merely witnesses to judgment. They are the beloved people whose very existence remains a sign of God’s irrevocable election.
VI. Wyschogrod and the Incarnation
Wyschogrod is also important because his theology unexpectedly helps Christians recover the Jewish concreteness of the incarnation.
Christianity confesses that the Word became flesh. But too often Christians then turn that confession into an anti-Jewish abstraction: Christ becomes the end of Jewish particularity rather than its deepest revelation. The incarnation is then used to escape Israel rather than to reveal Israel’s vocation.
Wyschogrod helps correct this. If God’s election of Israel is already a divine movement into embodied particularity, then the incarnation is not a rejection of Israel’s carnal election. It is, from the Christian side, the intensification of it. Jesus is not generic humanity. He is a son of Abraham, son of David, born of a Jewish mother, circumcised under Torah, formed by Israel’s Scriptures, worshiping Israel’s God, and embodying Israel’s priestly vocation.
Therefore, the incarnation does not authorize Gentile Christians to transcend Israel. It binds them more deeply to Israel. The body of Jesus is Jewish flesh. The risen Messiah does not shed his Israelite identity. He becomes the crucified and risen center through whom Israel’s vocation reaches the nations.
This is where Wyschogrod and Paul meet. Gentiles are not grafted into a universal religious idea. They are grafted into Israel’s cultivated olive tree through Israel’s Messiah.
VII. The Land and the State
Wyschogrod’s embodied election also affects the land question. If God chooses a people in the flesh, then land cannot be irrelevant. Human beings are not ghosts. Peoples need place, language, memory, burial, agriculture, justice, and public life. Israel’s relation to the land is therefore not an accidental detail.
Yet Wyschogrod does not simply give blank theological permission to every modern political claim. Soulen notes that Wyschogrod saw the land as indispensable to Israel’s life with God, but he was also unwilling to claim direct divine warrant for the modern State of Israel or for specific territorial claims in the present day.³
This is an important distinction for covenantal realism. The Jewish people’s relation to the land is real. The modern State of Israel is historically and providentially significant. But the state is not identical with the kingdom of God. Political sovereignty is not the same as priestly vocation. The sword is not the Shekinah.
Wyschogrod therefore helps us resist two opposite errors. Against spiritualizers, he says land and body matter. Against idolizers of the state, he reminds us that election remains under God’s judgment and command.
VIII. Necessary Critique
Wyschogrod must also be read critically.
Some Jewish critics have worried that his language risks divinizing the Jewish people or making Judaism too dependent on peoplehood rather than Torah. Leora Batnitzky notes that Wyschogrod’s claim that God is present, even “incarnated,” in the people Israel creates real tensions, especially with rabbinic tradition and oral Torah. She also warns that strong election language can become politically dangerous if detached from humility, justice, and the universal dimension of Abraham’s promise.⁴
This critique matters. Carnal election must not become carnal triumphalism. Israel is chosen, but chosen for priesthood. Israel is beloved, but beloved under command. Israel is embodied, but embodiment must not become idolatry of blood, land, or state.
Here Benamozegh balances Wyschogrod. Wyschogrod tells us Israel is embodied. Benamozegh tells us Israel is embodied for humanity. Wyschogrod guards election. Benamozegh guards vocation. Wyschogrod resists abstraction. Benamozegh resists possession.
Together they give a fuller covenantal realism.
IX. Why Wyschogrod Belongs in Torat Edom
Wyschogrod belongs in a Torat Edom project because Edom’s temptation is always to seize blessing while denying the body of the brother.
Edom does not merely reject Jacob. Edom envies Jacob, imitates Jacob, competes with Jacob, and seeks the blessing without accepting the wound of election. Christendom did this when it claimed Israel’s Bible and Messiah while turning the Jewish people into a cursed remainder. Modern secular universalism does this when it praises biblical ethics but dismisses Israel’s concrete covenantal existence. Some forms of Christian Zionism do it in reverse, when they use the Jewish people as an eschatological instrument while failing to honor the actual covenantal mystery of Israel.
Wyschogrod forces us to slow down. God did not choose a concept. God chose Abraham’s family. And that family, even in disobedience, exile, unbelief, suffering, and dispersion, remains beloved.
This does not solve every problem. It does not tell us exactly how to adjudicate every political claim. It does not erase the need for Messiah. It does not remove Israel’s accountability. But it does forbid the greatest Christian error: imagining that the blessing of Abraham can be received while the embodied Jewish people are forgotten.
X. Conclusion: The Body Cannot Be Replaced by an Idea
Michael Wyschogrod’s theology is a scandal because biblical election is a scandal. God loves all humanity, but he does so through the particular. God wills the healing of the nations, but he begins with Abraham. God intends universal blessing, but he carries it through Israel’s flesh.
This is why Israel cannot be spiritualized away. Israel is not merely “the faithful,” not merely “the church,” not merely “the people of God” as an invisible category. Israel is the embodied covenant people, the Jewish trunk-line, the family of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, opened by mercy to the ger and, through Messiah, to the nations.
Wyschogrod gives Christians a necessary rebuke: do not steal Israel’s soul by denying Israel’s body.
And he gives covenantal realism a necessary anchor: promise is not abstraction. Election is embodied. The Word of God enters flesh, peoplehood, genealogy, land, suffering, and history.
The body of faith matters because God keeps faith with bodies.
Endnotes
Kendall Soulen, “Michael Wyschogrod and God’s First Love,” The Christian Century, July 27, 2004. Soulen summarizes Wyschogrod’s major theme as God’s unalterable love for Israel, a love that cannot be abrogated from the human side.
R. R. Reno, “The Carnal Reality of Revelation,” First Things, April 26, 2010. Reno emphasizes Wyschogrod’s resistance to liberal abstraction and his account of Israel’s “carnal election” in relation to the Christian confession of incarnation.
Soulen notes that Wyschogrod viewed the land as indispensable to Israel’s life with God, while also refusing to claim direct divine warrant for the modern State of Israel or for specific contemporary territorial claims.
Leora Batnitzky, “Michael Wyschogrod and the Challenge of God’s Scandalous Love,” Jewish Review of Books, March 30, 2016. Batnitzky appreciates Wyschogrod’s importance while raising concerns about his strong claims regarding God’s presence in the Jewish people, his relation to rabbinic tradition, and the political dangers of election language if not balanced by universal vocation.
The Body of Faith: God in the People Israel is published by Bloomsbury/Jason Aronson; the publisher describes it as a comprehensive account of traditional Judaism in conversation with contemporary philosophy and Christian thought.
The Internet Archive record for the 1989 Harper & Row edition lists the book under the title The Body of Faith: God in the People Israel, with topics including Jewish election, Judaism, Jewish ethics, and God in Judaism.
Samuel Lebens summarizes Wyschogrod’s biography: born in 1928, escaped Nazi Germany as a child, studied Talmud at Yeshiva University under Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, and pursued doctoral work at Columbia on Kierkegaard and Heidegger.
Wyschogrod’s earlier essay “Israel, the Church, and Election” appeared in The Bridge: A Yearbook of Judaeo-Christian Studies, vol. 5, “Brothers in Hope,” published by Herder and Herder in 1970.
